Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Does a capitalized subfolder affect a URL's SEO value?

I have already read in this blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls) to never have any capitalization in the URL.

My client's CMS system automatically makes the subfolder "Pages" capitalized in the URL. Does this matter? would it be better to keep the URL with all capitalized letters or to change it so that only the subfolder is capitalized?

4 Responses

Stephan offers good advice. Since you are at the point of adjusting URLs I would add a bit:

Which format is better?

www.client.com/Pages/keyword-phrase.aspx

or

www.client.com/Pages/Keyword-Phrase.aspx

A simple rule to follow, always use lower case letters in URL folders and page names.

Another improvement would be to never use technology extensions in page names. The .aspx portion of your URL offers no value to users nor search engines. It makes your URL appear longer and more complicated. Drop it. The best URL for your page would be:

www.client.com/pages/keyword-phrase

All major CMS software can work with these standards. The adjustments should be relatively simple. If your software does not support this change, you are likely using a custom CMS or an outdated one. Either way I would recommend you use CMS software which is flexible enough to allow you to comply with known best practices.

I would also ad that it looks like Google adwords is only allowing lower case in the URLs. So if you are using a cap in a folder you would have to set up a redirect for any Google adword campaign that uses it in the URL.

Custom modify the CMS to use a lowercase 'p' and keep all of it lowercase. Your other option(as Rand says in that article) is do 301 redirect to an all lowercase URL. Mixed case URL's should only be used for PPC.

I realise this does not answer your question directly, so to answer I'd guess that less capitalization would be better(if I had to go with one or the other).

For example: DigitalFamily.com/Books and DigitalFamily.com/books are not the same address — the one with the capital B will not work.

The technical reason is that most web servers are case-sensitive and the part of the address that comes after the .com is based on the name of the folder or the filename that page resides in on the server.

In an ideal world only one would resolve and the other version would redirect to that version. This is simplest to implement with all lower-case urls, but it is possible to do it with capitalisation if you really can't change the CMS. It's also worth noti

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.